Many thanks to all those who entered the Mendeley Brainstorm related to Climate Change; picking a winner given all the well thought out answers was not a straightforward matter, however in the end, we selected Vinisha Varghese’s (of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore) response:
The answer is slightly more complex than a simple yes or no. On one hand, the Paris Agreement is celebrated as the documentation of the human race’s first collective effort to combat the biggest threat in our (relatively young) species’ narrative – climate change. On the other hand, this hot-air balloon is constantly shot down as nothing but a mere ‘green-washing’ of white paper. The bottom-line is that the assessed carbon budget is not sufficient to limit warming to 2°C nor does it help the SIDS – who have conveniently been handed a raw deal. While we have put our faith in negative emissions by means of CCS – scalable technology that we are yet to invent, there have been paradigm shifts to more sustainable practices. Personally, I look optimistically at this deal to restrict warming to below 4°C. To sum up, it all depends on our actions in the next 10 years.
We asked her what inspired her. She responded:
I believe what really inspired me to be more vocal is the idea that researchers can influence positive behavioral changes in the masses. We have to make known to the world that there is still hope and that there are ways of reaching that envisioned future if we only act on them. We can no longer sit back and expect our governments and policy-makers to take care of things though – the need of the hour is collective effort. As an optimist and someone closely involved in the environmental field, expressing my opinion on a platform like the Mendeley Brainstorm was a subtle way of giving a ‘nudge’.
Hopefully others will take the hint. Vinisha also told us:
Once again, I would like to express heartfelt thanks for choosing me from amongst so many well-informed experts! It was challenging to keep my opinion within the word limit.This recognition is incentive to keep a researcher like me (so early on in her career) well motivated.
Thank you, Vinisha!
Those who didn’t win this time are encouraged to respond to the latest Mendeley Brainstorm, regarding Hacking and Online Security. Thanks again to all our participants.
Mendeley Blog 
A bit late and a dollar short, I wrote this article a few days ago to a climate change discussion. I originally wrote the general idea about climate change in a book that is yet to be published, but this version, is a different adaptation to an article that I had commented on, the article was in a web page that made the whole thing look like a mystery and contrary to what I wrote, so the very next day it was mysteriously deleted. what can I say, I laughed haha. Well, I hope my version of the facts helps people deal with its continuous mystery.
The untold story of climate change
by Jose L. Vasquez
I don’t understand why people including scientist don’t understand the reasons for climate change, so Please allow me to describe Global-Warming in a different way. As is, our planet earth has a yearly weather pattern, divided into four seasons winter, summer, spring, and fall. well, our planet earth also has a weather pattern that is a little longer, with seasons known as climate change, with a 26 thousand year cycle, caused by a wobble on our planet’s rotation so you can count on this wobble to turn slowly in increments of 6.5 thousand years for each season. Consider climate change as a clock, a 26k year clock, and so you can view our Global Warming situation to be at it’s 6 o’clock and that the Ice Age will peak again at it’s 12 o’clock mark. Remember the great Biblical flood? Said to have happened 7500 years ago, putting that date at just before the 3 o’clock mark. when everything was starting to thaw, melt and flood the world as it was biblically noted.
So In other words, just as in the yearly cycles, we cannot stop the snow from melting in summer, nor the glaciers from melting in the global warming, would that makes more historical sense? Do you want more historical notations known as facts? Try the Native Americans entering the American continent, some 19k years ago, or about 3k years before the Ice Age peak, by then, at the Bearing Straight, the land-bridge would have been frozen already, the proof is all in the cycles and the understanding of them. In about 6.5k years from now, the global weather will turn very cold again, that will continue for the next 13k years, the Ice Age will peak again and the glaciers will return, so stop crying already, and enjoy the warm weather that will end in about 6.5k years from now.
1/13/2017